In Saturday’s race in Baltimore, California Chrome will try to take the second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown.

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In Saturday’s race in Baltimore, California Chrome will try to take the second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown.

May 16, 2014Mike Tyson, former heavyweight boxing champion, has a laugh with fans at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore before the running of the Black-Eyed Susan, a major pre-Preakness race. Stopchargingmaria won the Black-Eyed Susan.Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post

After California Chrome streaked to victory by more than five lengths in April’s Santa Anita Derby, the colt’s owners presented trainer Art Sherman with a Kentucky Derby cap so he could tell the world what the horse had just proclaimed: The California-bred colt was the favorite for the Run for the Roses.

Sherman wanted no part of the cap. It was a bad omen in the view of the 77-year-old trainer, who refuses to look too far ahead when it comes to the care and cultivation of racehorses, custom-tailoring their routine to their mood each day.

While Sherman may be old school in that regard, he’s hardly a slave to racing superstition or tradition; for instance, he scoffs at the old saw that horses with four white feet never amount to much.

Sherman also sees no sense in the Triple Crown’s cramped calendar, even if it is tradition. He is uneasy about the demands it places on the horses, with the Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes jammed in a five-week span.

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California Chrome wins the 140th running of the Kentucky Derby

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California Chrome wins the 140th running of the Kentucky Derby

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California Chrome wins the 140th running of the Kentucky Derby

The field comes out of the starter's gate to start the 140th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs on in Louisville, Kentucky. Rob Carr/Getty Images

“You have to be a super horse on the Triple Crown trail, to me,” said Sherman, the oldest trainer to win the Kentucky Derby. “It’s tough on a horse. It takes that certain horse that has the ability to do this.

“And I’m just hoping it’s mine, right now.”

Winning the Derby represented a crowning achievement for Sherman, a Brooklyn native who has spent his last six decades in barns and on backstretches having worked his way from stable boy, exercise rider and jockey to trainer.

His Los Alamitos-based Sherman Racing Stables is a modest operation; it has fewer than 20 horses and a staff of longtime employees that consists of family and horse people who may as well be family.

Sherman’s younger son, Alan, shares training duties with his father. His wife, Faye, pays the bills. California Chrome’s groom, Raul Rodriguez, has worked for Sherman for 15 years, as has Rodriguez’s wife, brother and son.

The operation reflects a modest man.

Sherman’s life has changed not one iota since California Chrome took off on his winning tear in December, though his wife did buy him a new suit on the eve of the recent Kentucky Derby — his first as a trainer. (Sherman was the exercise rider for the 1955 Derby winner, Swaps.)

He still keeps the same hours at the stables. And he’s first at the tracks when they open, although it has taken some juggling these last two weeks to squeeze in interviews with CBS, NBC and all the reporters who want to talk to him.

Earlier this week at Pimlico Race Course, Sherman was directed to a platform erected just outside Stall No. 40, reserved for the Derby winner, to field questions from the throng of journalists curious about the Preakness favorite and the sport’s lone hope for snapping the now 35-year drought of Triple Crown winners.

Thoroughbred racing certainly has its share of rock-star trainers — horsemen with creased jeans, starched shirts and perfectly coiffed hair who arrive at paddocks looking as if they just alit from private Lear jets.

Sherman isn’t among them. His barn-wear and bearing are as common as a bale of hay.

“I figure I’m lucky when I can pull my boots on in the morning: I’ve got another day,” he says with a chuckle.

And though his chestnut colt has humble origins, too — the product of an $8,000 mare bred for a $2,000 fee — California Chrome has become something of an equine rock star.

He has his own southern California billboard with his name in lights. It proclaims: “California Chrome, Home of the Kentucky Derby Winner.” He has a fervent following of fans known as Chromies. And he doesn’t even mind the paparazzi.

“He is a ham,” says Alan Sherman, who traveled from Churchill Downs to Pimlico with California Chrome earlier this week to get him settled. “He loves the cameras. He’ll stand up there on the track for an hour, if you let him, just sitting there watching horses and posing for the camera.”

Based on experience and recent performance, California Chrome should do another star turn Saturday as the odds-on favorite for the 139th running of the 13/16-mile Preakness Stakes.

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